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  • Today One (aka Tarn Adams) who is making Dwarf Fortress and formerly worked on Liberal Crime Squad is way up there.

    Redigit (of Super Mario Brothers X and Terraria) is another from the current era.

    But if we can go oldschool, Sid Meier is a legend. Civilization and Pirates! are two absolute favorites, especially the remake of Pirates and Civs 2 & 4.

    But the real OG, the man who showed me I wanted to make videogames, is Tim Sweeney. Sure, now he's rich and famous, but back in the day, even before UnReal, he ran Epic Megagames out of his parents' basement and sold floppies by mail. His first game, ZZT, came with the tools included to not just edit levels, but to make a whole new game of your own using the ZZT engine. By the time I discovered it there were already hundreds of user-made games being traded on BBS.

    I fell in love. I joined the IRC channels and bulletin boards, I made the games I wanted, I shared them with my friends and over the Internet. It sparked a love in me that still burns today. Sweeney moved on, I moved on, but I will always owe him my regard for releasing ZZT into the world. It changed my life.

    • Sid Meier and Firaxis in general are probably the only ones that have been consistently great for me over the years. I still think about Alpha Centauri a lot, and I've played so much Civ over the years. His studio's XCOM games and Midnight Suns are all great, too.

      Pretty much all the others I could name closed up shop or have declined in recent years.

  • 90s era Maxis, Bullfrog, Black Isle Studios, Troika Games.

    JoWood also gets a special mention.

    This is a more retro selection.

  • Since this is retro gaming, I've got to go with Microprose (Civilization, Colonization, X-Com games and more). But my love also goes to other developers that EA destroyed, in particular Maxis, Westwood Studios and Origin. Special shout-out to three more studios I had amazing memories with: New World Computing (Might and Magic), Sir-Tech (Wizardry) and Blue Byte (Settlers, Battle Isle, Albion).

  • Under the constraint that I'm only picking from developers who already have multiple games under their belt, it'd be hard to choose between Zachtronics and Supergiant for me. Both of them have a perfect track record in my book. The only difference being that there most likely won't be any new releases from Zachtronics anymore, whereas Supergiant is only becoming stronger with each release.

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